In fact, IBM copyrighted the term "byte" which is one of the reasons that
the international standards community refers to 8 bit quantities as
"octets".

Tom

>
> That's true, more or less... The word "byte" was originally defined
> as the amount used to represent one character; when the word was
> first coined, a "byte" was a six-bit number.
>
> However... The 8-bit definition of "byte" predates microcomputers and
> microprocessors by over a decade; the IBM System/360, designed in the
> '50s, started to standardize a "byte" as eight bits.  Ever since
> then, most people have used the word "byte" specifically to mean an
> eight-bit quantity, and referred to the other sizes -- imprecisely --
> as "words".
>
> -Andy
>
> === Andrew Warren - fastfwd@ix.netcom.com
> === Fast Forward Engineering - Vista, California
> === http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/2499